1. I deserve this scholarship because I don't want it. I plan to drop out of college and sit at home all day long, lounging with my cats and dogs up in Beverly Hills. I plan to stay in silk robes and drink wine all day long, awaiting my husband to come back to me. 2. My career goal is to join the technology industry. I absolutely LOVE math, coding, and computers. I want to work alongside Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and hopefully become incredibly rich, powerful, and famous. I am going to graduate from a New York College and move to LA to pursue this dream. 3. An obstacle I've overcome recently is caring about Shakespeare. His long, boring sonnets and plays were an assigned reading that I was dreading. I hated every moment of the Shakespeare class, but I was able to struggle my way through plays like Hamlet and Taming of the Shrew. I was only changed for the worse.

Setting priorities, boundaries, and speaking my truth in my college experience has tremendously improved my mental health and the mental health of those around me. As a first generation college student, I had no guidelines to tell me how to navigate the stress that college would bring. My community college was great, but the counseling focused on school, and it never felt like it was okay to try and bring up personal issues. As a transfer student to a four year university with 24,000 students, I struggled to understand how to fit in. Not only that, but I wasn't shown any healthy habits on how to manage personal, academic, and emotional stress all at the same time. When I arrived at UCSB, all of my struggles and past issues weighed on me. For someone who wasn't a great high school student (with B and C averages) to an overachieving community college student (who received a 3.9) I began to lose my way. High school was a fun and exciting time for me, and I was always with my friends and tended to get distracted by school. When I got to college, there wasn't a close sense of community, and I focused soley on school work. Trying to find the balance between both became unbearable. I found myself getting distracted, unsure of how to deal with the new expectations given to me by my parents and family as the first one to go to college, and the struggle to fit in with my new friends and roommate. I found myself stuck in a loop of unknown and I ended up feeling extremely depressed. I began to lose confidence in myself and my abilities, and I allowed myself to fall behind. Then my best friend and roommate reached out to me, and she let me know about my school's resources for student's who struggled with their mental health. It was not easy to explain how the weigh of other's expectations and the need to fit in was holding me back to a stranger. However, my therapist and I dedicated time to making sure that I was setting my priorities, understanding what I felt was more important and when. It also came with learning to say no when I had work I wanted to focus on and my friends wanted to go out. I also began to talk with my roommates more honestly to let them know me, and it helped me to feel like I had more people to go to when I felt sad or alone. Going to therapy helped me to realize how my past had a stronghold on my mind, and that I wasn't allowing myself to enjoy my life and make sure I got my work done in a balanced medium. I was able to see that I didn't need to doubt myself in my studies, or assume that because I wasn't going out with my friends they wouldn't like me anymore. School can still be incredibly stressful, and I often times have to move through my anxiety about fitting in and being true to myself and my own expectations. It's okay to have both, and it took getting help to understand that there is a way to have more than one would think. It helped me to focus on my classes and keep on track for my future career as a writer. It gave me a greater perspective on people to know that I wasn't alone in this struggle. It helps me to understand people and be more empathetic, something I hope to show in my writing.

I had never really understood the comic medium until I started to take a class on it this quarter at my college. I was able to read Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, and it has profoundly changed the way I experienced interactions with comic books. I had always wanted to get into comics, but this one in particular showed me how thought provoking and intense comics can really be. It made me realize that our world is truly a scary place, full of unpredictable circumstances and tough choices, too. However, this comic pushes the message of working through your trauma, staying true to yourself through tough times, and trying to be at peace with things that are out of your control. It reminded me that life is beautiful and needs to be appreciated so that we can enjoy the good times we have and look back on them when they're needed.

One of the hardest times of my life was when I found out that one of my family members was an addict. It taught me how to be a strong, nurturing, and accepting person towards others. This originally affected me and my academic achievement as it is one of the reasons I didn’t go to college right out of high school. It took a strong toll on my family, but I felt responsible for this person — to help them get better. When I did that, and I really began to take their feelings and their struggle into consideration, I was able to help them. Through this experience, I was taught to have compassion and to forgive. I truly believe that my family member wouldn’t have made it, as some of my family cast a blind eye to them. I found that by staying by their side and showing them that their past does not define them, that they were able to get better, and to this day, remain clean. It was one of the hardest times of my life, and I blamed myself for a lot of it, but the moment I realized that this person was suffering, and that they needed a helping hand, my entire life-view changed. I was able to see that nothing was going to get better without accepting their flaws, and letting them know that their past may have been bad, but that they didn’t need that to define their future. Having to accept my family, and everyone around me, for who they are without judgement has lifted a weight off my soul that helped me find a purpose in life. It helped me to see that this world deserves more kindness and humility, and that acknowledging that is only part of the solution. This helped me to forgive and be able to live life without regret of the past. This entire experience also helped me realize that I needed to help myself as well and it pushed me to go to college. It has truly made me a stronger person, and I know that without this experience, I would have never gained this new view I have on life. With this new outlook, I plan to take steps in life towards affecting others. I want to make a difference for more people, to show them that their experiences do no have to limit them. I hope to inspire people and help them see that if they are determined and if they can take the steps required to work on themselves, anything is possible. This experiences drives me to always look for ways to move forward and dedicate time to myself and my own success, because if I am able to take care of myself, I can then extend that care to others.